November 27, 2005

Zend Studio 5 released

I have been using the demo version of Zend Studio 5. It's a nice PHP IDE.

The coolests features certainly are the debugger and the profiler.

If you ever used Visual Studio, you know that a good debugger is the only hope when you start pulling your hair off.

But PHP, as a native "virtual" language (no real pointers etc), never really needed a debugger. In this case, the debugger is used to correct logic errors that may appear.

One interesting new feature is the code folding, that allows you to show or hide the definition of functions, classes, just like open and close a tree in explorer (this is old feature in IDEs like Visual Studio).

Another feature is the better phpDoc support, that makes the documentation of PHP scripts be easy and fast.

And finally, there is support to Subversion, a version control system that is better than CVS.

I'm testing this IDE, and I recommend to all of you that program in PHP. If you still are on the dark side of the force, I mean, using notepad as you editor, don't be lazy and download ZS5. You will love it.